Slashdot Mirror
Far From Being a Utilitarian Afterthought, an Astonishing Number of Design Choices Go Into Pagination (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In his landmark 1931 book An Essay on Typography, the British typographer Eric Gill discusses everything from the proper place for the tail of an 'R' to terminate to which type of word press might best serve the amateur typographer. He casts the printed word as sacred. But there's one thing -- a silent, steady workhorse found in nearly every book -- that Gill fails to address: the lowly page number. The functional role of the page number is simple: it provides order and sequence to a text. And while it is a supremely utilitarian design element, more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
Holy shit -- do we have a slow news day?
* If you have single sided printing, you can put the page number centered at the bottom.
* If you have double-sided printing, you can put the page number near the outside edges.
But let's keep over analyzing something that takes less then 10 second to think about.
Has anyone found an "The Outline" post on Slashdot that hasn't fallen under
1) Uninformed Gibberish
2) Trolling clickbait
3) Completely boring filler of interest to no one even the topic's core audience
When I'm reading a book, and I want to find a past sentence, but I cannot remember in exactly which chapter or page, I wish I can use something similar to `Ctrl+F` :D
Tabs. Why? Because if you don't like the indentation the way it is, you can easily adjust your tab spacing without altering the code. No matter what the person writing the code thought is the "correct" amount of whitespace between edge and indented code, your setting will provide whatever amount you consider correct.
Try that if you insist that 4 spaces are indentation and I think that 2 is plenty. And don't you DARE to add spaces to my code because then it will be ALL WRONG when I check it back out. And you can be certain that I will correct your horrible mistake!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, the only one that's solved so far is the thing where some people argue--on text medium, no less--that two spaces need not follow a period ending a sentence because the space is automatically bigger anyway. Meanwhile, two spaces after a period ending a sentence is actually larger than a single space after an abbreviation like "Mr."; and the space after a period is, in fact, not proportionally wide compared to spaces in other places on the very screens in which these debates take place.
Even in the summary of this very Slashdot article, you can see the narrow space between "text. And" and, unsurprisingly, you can do a quick scan 2-3 times to find a period at the end of a sentence--but you have to deliberately read through the summary to identify the end of each sentence, whereas placing two spaces after periods and colons creates a visual break.
The only valid argument against two spaces is the argument that the visual break serves no purpose in the textual structure; this of course would devolve into a debate over the readability of small paragraphs versus giant walls of unbroken text, should anybody actually have the debate. The people arguing for small paragraphs would have science on their side, and the single-space advocates would be reduced to gibbering about intra-paragraph white space structure not having an impact on reading comprehension.
Then: some nerd would point out that HTML collapses all spans of white space into single spaces anyway during rendering, as if the fact that something impedes progress suddenly makes progress wrong.
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Is the convention of putting in page numbers as -. It completely breaks the ability to quickly find a page number if it's in dead-tree, or by grabbing the scroll bar and scrubbing if electronic.
If you tell me the page of interest is on page 8-2, that really doesn't tell me how far it is into the document, but if you tell me it's on page 253, I can quickly scan through until I find it.
And yes, I know that hyperlinks and search functions are a thing, but I don't care... Get off my lawn!
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
How is this news for nerds again and who cares?
Typography is a pretty nerdy field.
Having authored a number of books (technical/educational) and been deeply involved in page layout and pedagogy, I can tell you that these things are taken VERY seriously. And, yes, our editorial and authoring teams have had holy wars over much less than this.
These issues come to the forefront when books will be re-used by the same person. Something that is educational or used as a reference requires great thought with regards to layout.
Typography and related layout issues are quite an art. I wish there was some simple reference guide. Chicago Manual of Style only goes so far.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Nowadays, the layouters and designers have long been sacked.
Widows and orphans on every (other) page, nobody knows anymore that title size and the extra space below should be a multiple of the normal text, so the alignment of the articles in the previous and next columns are completely ignored. If it is too obvious, some poor soul inserts a vertical line between the columns.
Look closely at your local newspaper and check one online from 30-40 years ago and you'll immediately see the difference.
Since the day Pagemaker was invented, it has gone downhill.
And if you are working for someone else, chances are, there is a *Coding Convention* to adhere to, McFly.
I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently.
Sorry, there is no more pagination on the web.
Now all of the content for each site is concatenated together into a single endless page which stuffs more crap onto the bottom every time you scroll down a bit.
True story. I once eagerly devoured a documentary on Helvitica.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Every time I type a comment on slashdot I have to go back and count my sentence spaces out of a genuine fear that someone will notice and light into my ass.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
....and yet none of that shit matters because people buy their books online...hence the rise of Amazon and her robots.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Half communist catholic who fucked his daughters, his sisters and.... his dog. Freaky is one way to put it.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Pro tip: Words like "Mr." and many other handles (with or without a ".") should always be followed by a nbsp to stop possible dissociation across a line break, Mr.
bluefoxlucid
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently.
Sorry, there is no more pagination on the web.
Now all of the content for each site is concatenated together into a single endless page which stuffs more crap onto the bottom every time you scroll down a bit.
That infinite scroll bullshit annoys me to no end. I'm always happy to find a site where I can specify the page I want to see or the number of lines / elements by tweaking the URL.
Naw, each site is split up. After reading each paragraph you have to click the "next" button and be subjected to another barrage of advertisements. This compensates the web site owner's expense of copying someone else's article and rebranding it.
Again, the client is stupid: it does not make wise layout decisions in many cases.
Maybe it's possible for a "perfect" and concise auto-layout language/convention to be invented that automatically flows and resizes wisely and nice, but I haven't see such yet. They all have areas they foul up on or are weak on.
Until the bots get smart, let the human have more damned control so we don't spend all day second-guessing retarded bots to work around their flaws.
Table-ized A.I.
Who marked this "Troll"??? He really did all of that!
Search for "Eric Gill" on the internet.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism